In another of today’s SCOTUS decisions, the Court ruled in
NIFLA v. Becerra that a California law requiring crisis
pregnancy centers (pregnancy counseling clinics usually run by
pro-life Christians) to post notices that “California has public
programs that provide immediate free or low-cost access to
comprehensive family planning services (including all...

“”Should Brazil keep its Amazon tribes from taking the lives of
their children?” is the subtitle of
a recent article in Foreign Policy. It describes
traditional but still-existent customs of many Amazon tribes in
Brazil that dictate kill...

One of the things that struck me about
this article excoriating Alan Dershowitz for his recent defense
(not support, but defense) of Trump is that author Elie Mystal
doesn’t actually engage in any detail with the substance of
Dershowitz’s arguments.

Mystal’s attack on Dershowitz (and Trump, for that matter) is ad
hominem....

Only thing is—the Economist thinks the Times hasn’t been hard enough on Israel.

Actually, the article in question from the Economist is about language, in particular, the “weasel voice” of evasion (it’s part of a continuing “Johnson” series about words/grammar in journalism, named after Samuel Johnson).(more…)

Unlike Watergate, the current crisis in government/spying/politics doesn’t have a memorable name. But for those of us who lived through Watergate, it has a certain resonance with that event as well as major differences, imparting a strange sense of familiarity, dislocation, and increasing alarm.(more…)

Posted by New NeoSaturday, March 24, 2018 at 10:00am3/24/2018 at 10:00am

What do these three things have in common: the recent Biden vs.
Trump war of threatening words, the Dozens, and Inuit song duels?
They’re all ways that people threaten each other in an
almost-comical way, in which the real competition is about who is
being the wittiest and boldest in speech....

Posted by New NeoSunday, March 11, 2018 at 12:10pm3/11/2018 at 12:10pm

Richard Landes is a brilliant man who has worked tirelessly for
close to two decades to expose the biases and distortions present
in worldwide media coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I
also count him as a friend.

Posted by New NeoSaturday, March 10, 2018 at 2:00pm3/10/2018 at 2:00pm

Reading reports of so many high-profile murders by teenagers,
it’s not unusual for people to assume that there’s been a big
increase in killings by young people, both murder and suicide. But
statistics tell a much more complex story.

Posted by New NeoSaturday, January 13, 2018 at 11:00am1/13/2018 at 11:00am

The latest furor is over certain remarks that Trump is alleged
to have uttered during a meeting
about immigration with Dick Durbin, Lindsay Graham, and “other
government officials.” His alleged remarks (some of which
he has disputed) were criticized variously for both form and
content:...